TALK ABSTRACT

Over the past several years, GM Financial IT has been on a mission to deliver faster and better quality products to the business to support the demand of the always changing financial market. As we quickly progressed in build and release automation, we found the new bottleneck of manual quality testing, which is time consuming and prone to user error. With the backing of senior management, a new team of Software Development Engineers were tasked with resolving our testing delays though automation. Although the team’s first initiative was to create test automation scripts, we found there was a large need to create a more enterprise solution for quality testing within organization.

At the beginning of 2017, we started implementing our strategy of Test Data Self-Service catalog items that can provide on demand data to the business. Leveraging the CA tool, Test Data Management, we started to grow our service stack to internal IT and the business. Our process started by integrating our current test automation with synthetic data generation. Once we confirmed functionality of the data, our team met with our data requestors to start putting together a list of common request options. At the end of our first test integration, we had a working UI that provided drop down options for test data requests.

As we continue to integrate test automation with self-service requests, we have found many benefits to centralizing our process requests. Standardization has become increasingly important in maintaining quality within our test automation. It has also helped bridge the gap between business and IT terminology by requiring business friendly verbiage in the request catalog. Reporting is less of a challenge now that we have requests coming from a single source. Overall, GM Financial Quality Assurance has and will continue to work on providing the business with faster and better products.